[msla]

You don't need JS to make a website where all of the text is in image files because the website designer needed to use a specific font at a specific size and loading fonts over the Internet was a bizarre pipe dream in 1999. Also, pixels are the same size for everyone, because I say so.

You don't need JS to make a website play MIDI at you.

You don't need JS to make a website shove all of the navigation into Flash. OK, maybe ActionScript is an extended version of ECMAScript, but the point is, Flash isn't accessible, and it's as bad as, if not worse than, the least accessible modern websites.

You don't need JS to make a website centered entirely around frames. Frame-centric design is truly the forgotten scourge of Web development.

The point is, there's a certain segment of the Webdev-hiring population who demands websites be either print documents or applications. They're utterly immovable and, therefore, will get what they want, which is websites with pixel-perfect rendering (regardless of how horrible they look on anything but their own monitor) or websites which, as you say, are applications in a browser. None of this is new. Web browser development has, in part, been a process of enabling browsers to appease these people while giving Webdevs more options to make the resulting pages at least somewhat less annoying.